Related Guides
Find Films
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Academic Video Online This link opens in a new window Academic Video Online delivers more than 67,000 titles spanning a range of subject areas including anthropology, business, counseling, film, health, history, music, and more. It includes documentaries, films, demonstrations, and other content types.
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Ethnographic Video Online, Volume I-II: Foundational Films This link opens in a new window
Contains classic and contemporary ethnographies, documentaries and shorts from every continent, providing teachers visual support to introduce and contextualize hundreds of cultural groups and practices around the world.
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BU Libraries Search This link opens in a new window BU Libraries Search provides a single place to search for a wide variety of research material provided by the library. Resources covered by the search includes books and eBooks, journals, scores and sheet music, video and audio recordings, and other physical and electronic items held by the library. Coverage encompasses materials relating to the prehistoric and antique world through to the present.
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Penn Museum Anthropological and Archaeological Films (University of Pennsylvania) In its 120-year history, the University of Pennsylvania Museum has collected nearly one million objects, many obtained directly through its own field excavations or anthropological research. This collection on the Internet Archive represents a portion of the motion picture film collection housed at the Museum.
Selected Films
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Maharajah Burger (streaming, Ethnographic Video Online) This film takes a wry look at the cultural confrontation of East and West, as reflected in attitudes towards the cow. In India, the cow is revered and cared for well beyond its prime. We see a hospice where cows spend their last days in comfort. When the BBC reports on the mass slaughter of cows due to mad cow disease, the Indians are appalled. One suggests that the British send their sick and old cows to India for caretaking. When McDonald's opened up in New Delhi, featuring the Maharajah Burger, there was outrage at this affront. To many Indians it is a symbol of Western cultural imperialism -- Western greed undermining traditional values in India. One elderly maharajah hopefully observes that the Indian culture has survived thousands of years and will not succumb to this latest onslaught.
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The Lunchbox (streaming, Alexander Street) Normally, Mumbai's "dabbawallas"—couriers who bring home-cooked meals to office workers—are models of efficiency. One day, though, a frustrated housewife (Nimrat Kaur) finds that the gourmet lunch she made to stir her inattentive husband got misdelivered to a widowed accountant (Irrfan Khan) unable to face his pending retirement. A correspondence starts that changes them both, in this understated charmer.
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Cooking in the Danger Zone: India (streaming, Academic Video Online) Food writer Stefan Gates visits India's poorest area to meet the Dalit, or Untouchables.
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India: Sanjeev Kapoor (streaming, Academic Video Online) Mumbai is India's richest and most populous city. The home of Bollywood is known as the 'city of dreams'; for years, wave after wave of immigrants from all over the country have travelled to the city, bringing their culinary treasures with them.
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Dal puri diaspora (streaming, Academic Video Online) The recipe for dal puri traveled with indentured workers from India’s Gangetic plain to southern Caribbean colonies of Britain and the Netherlands in the 19th Century. In the 1960s the wrapped roti migrated from Trinidad to North America, where it is known as Caribbean or West Indian roti and is popular in cities like New York and Toronto.
